CSH | Selfbuild Central

Retrofit

‘Under the Sun’, a Victorian terrace house in Birmingham is an outstanding example of bringing a fairly typical old building up to PassivhausSee more on the Passivhaus standard. The PassivHaus Institute has pioneered a standard for low energy buildings. It includes very low energy usage and ways of achieving this. The word is derived [...]

Designing with timber

timber house in the Field of Dreams, Findhorn FoundationThe Findhorn Foundation is a large community near Inverness. There is a strong emphasis on sustainable building and living.

See some of the wealth of interesting UK timber designs here.

advantages and drawbacks

Timber can provide some of the greenest solutions to house building for several [...]

Design it yourself

Have fun designing your house.

There are several worthwhile advantages if you do your own design work (or at least part of it) -

it may be the only way to get what you want. you achieve a kind of creative act that you can do in very few realms of your life. you [...]

Part L and SAP (England)

The Building Regulations, part L, is the section which covers energy conservation for new buildings (with part L1A covering new buildings and part L1B covering existing ones)

At present there is a period of transition which is well explained in an NHBCThe National House-Building Council describes itself as being “the leading warranty and insurance provider [...]

Green Design

October 2011

Background

If you are thinking of building a green building then it pays to be aware of where this whole process is going

Eco-house design is a fairly recent development which started getting off the ground in the UK during the mid 1990s.

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Although you will probably end up using [...]

Window design

There are many purposes a window can serve and several of these have important ecological considerations:

Letting light in Collecting solar heat Providing a view Acting as a door The visual character of a house

Windows may have associated drawbacks to consider:

They may let in too much light at certain times Too [...]

Habitat Protection

Part of habitat protection is mandatory and part can be insisted on by planners. Then there are, of course the opportunities to enhance habitat or at least mitigate the damage done to it. Building in the countryside is usually more of a risk to rich habitats than building on brownfield sites.

One of the [...]

Water Conservation

This tends to be something of a regional issue but certainly in the South East, it is becoming a major concern with planning permissionthe legal basis for being allowed to do some form of development such as building a house. (not to be confused with Building RegulationsThese are the legal regulations which govern how [...]

Building Regulations

February 2013

See the government web site on Building Regulations

Building Regulations deal with whether the building is built properly and is safe and energy efficient etc. more+/-»

They are not to be confused with Planning Consentthe legal basis for being allowed to do some form of development such as building a house. (not to [...]